Introduction to Amazon Route53

In Simplest terms, cloud computing means storing and accessing the data and programs on remote servers hosted on the internet instead of the computer’s hard drive or local server. It is also referred to as Internet-based computing. In this article we guide on discussing what is Amazon Route53, how does it works, benefits, limitations many more, the following Table of Content gives clear understanding on that we going to discuss in this article.

What Is Amazon Route 53?

Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable cloud Domain Name System (DNS) web service. It is designed for developers and corporations to route the end users to Internet applications by translating human-readable names like www.geeksforgeeks.org into the numeric IP addresses like 192.0.1.1 that computers use to connect.  You cannot use Amazon Route 53 to connect your on-premises network with AWS Cloud.

How Does Amazon Route53 Works?

Amazon Route53 is an aws service than offers a DNS (Domain Name System) web service which is scalable and high available. It is essential for conversion of user friendly domain names into IP addresses so that internet communication can proceed without difficulties. The following are the some of the main features explaining on how Amazon Route 53 functions well:

• Domain Registration And Management: Amazon Route 53 allows users to register and maintain domain names through its user-friendly interface. Users can transfer their existing domain to the Route 53 service or can go for register a new one. Users may freely configure the DNS settings, including mail server setups (MX records), domain name aliases , and more, once they have registered.
• Global DNS Resolution: Route 53 uses a worldwidet network cast made up of many DNS servers that have been placed strategically all over the world. The IP address which matches to a domain name entered by a user in their web browser is sent back by Route 53’s DNS servers. Users can immediately access the websites and services from anywhere in the globe because of Route 53’s low latency and high-performance DNS resolution by using global network.
• Traffic Routing And Load Balancing: Users can set up load balancing and fallback setups for their applications with Route 53’s wide traffic routing capabilities. Users may distribute incoming traffic among several endpoints, such as Amazon EC2 instances, Elastic Load Balancers, or by other external resources, by utilizing capabilities like DNS-based latency routing and weighted round-robin routing.

Functions Of Route53

• If a web application requires a domain name, Route53 service helps to register the name for the website (i.e domain name).
• Whenever a user enters the domain name, Route53 helps to connect the user to the website.
• If any failure is detected at any level, it automatically routes the user to a healthy resource.
• Amazon Route 53 is cost effective, secure and scalable.
• Amazon Route 53 is flexible, highly available and reliable.

Methodologies Related To Route53

• Records: Records are created to route internet traffic to the resources. They are the objects present in the hosted zone which determines how the internet traffic has to be routed for a domain name so that it finally reaches the resources. The name of each record in a hosted zone must end with the name of the hosted zone.
• Hosted zone: When the domain name is registered, Route53 creates a public hosted zone that has the same name as the domain name. It is a collection of records that contains information about how to route traffic of its domains and all of its subdomains.
• DNS query: It is a request for information sent from DNS client to the DNS server.
• Alias records: Alias records helps in routing internet traffic to AWS resources like S3 bucket, Amazon CloudFront, etc. It is created at the top node of the DNS namespace.
• Name servers: They are the servers in the DNS that translates the domain name into IP address so that internet traffic can be routed to the resources.
• DNS failover: A method for routing the traffic from unhealthy resources to healthy resources, whenever a failure is detected.
• Routing policy: Routing policy determines how Amazon Route53 responds to queries.

Types Of AWS Routing Policies

The following are the types of AWS Routing Policies:

• Simple Routing Policy: It is a simple Route53 routing technique that can be used to route internet traffic to a single resource. For example; Web server to a website. Using this, routing multiple records with the same name cannot be created but multiple values ( such as multiple IP addresses ) can be specified in the same record.
• Failover Routing Policy: Whenever a resource goes unhealthy, this policy allows to route the traffic from unhealthy resource to healthy resource.
• Geolocation Routing Policy: This routing policy routes the traffic to resources on the basis of the geographic location of the user. Geographic locations can be specified by continent, country, or state.  For example; A person residing in France will be redirected to the website in the French language while a person from the US will be redirected to the website in the English language.
• Geoproximity Routing Policy: It routes traffic on the basis of the geographical location of the user and the type of content user wants to access. The user can optionally shift traffic from resources at one location to resource at another location. Using this policy, a user can shift more traffic to one location compared to another location by specifying a value known as bias.
• Latency Routing Policy: If a website has to be hosted in multiple regions then a latency based routing policy is used. To improve performance for the users, this policy helps in serving requests from the AWS region that provides the lowest latency. To use this policy, the latency records for the resources are created in multiple AWS regions.
• Multivalue Routing Policy:  It is used when users want Route53 to return multiple values in response to DNS queries. It first checks the health of resources and then returns the multiple values only for the health resources.
• Weighted Routing Policy:  This routing policy routes traffic to multiple resources with a single domain name according to the proportion decided by the user.

Amazon Route53 supported DNS Record Types

The following are the DNS record types that are supported in Amazon Route53:

• A Record ( Address Record ): It is associated with an IPv4 address that is used to point a domain or subdomain to specify a IP address.
• AAAA Record ( IPv6 Address Record ): It is similar to A Record type but it is associated with IPv6 address. It associates the name with an IPv6 Address.
• CNAME Record ( Canonical Name Record ): It creates an alias to Domain Name that pointing to another domain name. It used for setuping subdomains or pointing multiple domain names to the same server.
• MX Record (Mail Exchange Record ): It specifies the mail server responses to receiving email on behalf of a domain. It is used for email routing.

Benefits And Features Of Route53

• Highly Reliable: Route53 is built using AWS’s highly available and reliable infrastructure. The distributed nature of the AWS DNS servers helps ensure a consistent ability to route the end-users to the web application.
• Scalable: It automatically scales the resources during large traffic and also handles large queries without the user’s intervention.
• Easy To Use:  Very user-friendly and easy to configure DNS settings. It can start to answer your DNS queries within minutes. Can be mapped easily to any resource.
• Health Check: Route 53 monitors the health of the application. If any failure is detected, it automatically redirects the user to a healthy resource before the customer can identify the problem.
• Flexible: You can decide which policy you want to use at given time.
• Simple: Using routing types, Route53 helps to manage traffic globally.
• Cost-Effective: Payment is done only according to the services used.
• Secure: By integrating it with IAM, the access to Amazon Route53 is secured by giving its permissions to only the authorized users.
• Mapped With Various AWS Services: It can be used to map domain names to Amazon EC2 instances, S3 buckets, and other AWS resources.

Route 53 Resolver for Hybrid Clouds

The following are the Route 53 resolvers for Hybrid Clouds:

• Seamless Integration: Route 53 Resolver seamlessly integrates on premises networks with AWS Virtual Private Cloud ( VPCs ) supporting hybrid cloud architectures. It helps in DNS resolutions between resources in VPCs and on-premises and AWS environments without need of complex configurations.
• Centralized DNS Management: With the help of Route53 resolver, organization manages DNS configurations centrally across both on-premises and AWS environments. This centralized management simplifies the administration and ensuring consistency in DNS resolution.
• DNS Resolution Across Boundaries: Route 53 resolves all the DNS queries that to be resolved across the VPC boundaries between on-premise networks and VPCs.
• Highly Available And Scalable: Route 53 resolver developed on top of high scalable and available infrastructure of Amazon route 53. It automates the scaling of DNS query loads ensuring the performance and high availability.

Amazon Route53 Limitations

Amazon Route53 is an aws service that offers scalable and highly available DNS web service. It has many limitations aside of benefits. The following are some of the limitation of Amazon Route53:

• Geographical Load Balancing Limitations: You may route traffic according to the user’s location using Route 53’s simple geographic DNS load balancing feature. The scope of this feature is limited, it wouldn’t as effective as global server load balancing solutions.
• Complex Configuration For Advanced Routing: For users who are not been familiar with DNS and AWS services, configuring complex routing policies, such as latency-based or weighted routing, can be challenging and need time for understanding.
• DDoS Protection Constraints: Although Route 53 is capable of handling certain DDoS attacks, companies with strict security needs may need to take extra safety precautions because of its limited defenses.
• Basic Domain Registration Features: The domain registration capabilities offered by Route 53 are actually simple; they don’t include many advanced features like domain privacy protection and a large selection of top-level domain (TLD) alternatives.

Use Cases Of Amazon Route 53

The following are the use cases of Amazon Route 53:

• High Availability And Reliability: Route 53 is designed for facilitating highly available and reliable DNS (Domain Name System ) service. It uses global distribution network of DNS Servers for ensuring fast and accurate resolutions of DNS queries.
• Scalability: Whenever the traffic grows up, the Route53 service scales seamlessly in handling millions of DNS queries per second, without looking any intervention required on your part. This lets the users to access the applications or websites even during the high period of demands.
• Traffic Management: Route53 provides the traffic management features that facilitates the route end users to most of the appropriate resources that are based on factors such as geographic locations, latency, health checks and routing policies.
• Health Checks And Failures: Route53 supports in monitoring the health of the application endpoints and helps in automatically rerouting the traffic to healthy endpoints in case of failures or degraded performance.
• Integration With Other AWS Services: Route53 facilitates with seamless integration with other AWS services such as Amazon S3, Elastic Load Balancing and Amazon CloudFront allows to easily route the traffic to these services and increase the capabilities for scalable architectures.

Pricing Of Amazon Route53

The following discuss on the pricing of Amazon Route53, when it is included/utilized with following features:

Features	Pricing
Hosted Zones	It charges $0.50 per hosted zone per month
Queries	It Charges at $0.400 rate per million queries
Health Checks	It Charges at $0.750 per health check per month
Domain Registration	The pricing of Domain registration vary based on TLD.

Alternatives Of Amazon Route53

The following are the some of the alternatives for Amazon Route53:

• Google Cloud DNS: Google Cloud Platform provides a dependable and scalable DNS solution with worldwide anycast method of IP addresses, low-latency DNS replies, and communication with other Google Cloud services. Google’s strong infrastructure and security features are advantageous to users.
• Cloudflare DNS: Cloudflare’s global server network provides an efficient and secure DNS solution. It facilitates with online security features, content delivery network (CDN) services, and DDoS protection in along with DNS resolution. It is well-known for its effectiveness and dedication to security.
• Microsoft Azure DNS: Microsoft’s DNS service is accessible through its Azure cloud infrastructure. It provides features like private DNS zones and alias records and works efficiently with other Azure services acting as a good preferred cloud provider.
• Dyn (Oracle Infrastructure DNS): Global DNS support is provided by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure DNS, commonly known as Dyn. It is scalable service that ensures low-latency DNS resolution. It offers complex routing choices, traffic management tools, and a global infrastructure making suitable for businesses with various DNS requirements.

To Know How to Conigure Amazon Route 53 In AWS refer this – Article

How To Configure Amazon Route 53 In AWS ?

AWS Route53 is a highly available DNS service and scalale service, it working model is as shown below.

Let’s take an example, client accessed some site URL www.mysite.in in the browser

• End user requests the URL in the browser
• DNS Resolver resolves the domain
• ROute53 returns the IP Address for the record
• From the IP address received browser will show the User interface

To know more in detail read to How To Configure Amazon Route 53 In AWS

Conclusion

In conclusion, Amazon Route 53 is a trusted and scalable DNS provider that makes it easier for establishing communicate over the internet by converting domain names into IP addresses. By facilitating features such as traffic routing, load balancing and DNS resolution it makes domain registration and administration easier. Besides of Route53 advantages users should be aware of its drawbacks such as its restrictions to geographical load balancing.

Amazon Route53 – FAQs

What Is AWS Route53 Used For?

AWS Route53 is a scalable and highly available DNS Web Service provided by AWS. It primarily used for conrting human readable domain names into numeric IP addresses for having communication over internet.

Is AWS Route53 A Load Balancer?

AWS Route53 is not only dedicated to traffic routing, it comes with traffic routing and load balancing capabilities. It essential to route the end-users to web applications based on the configuration policies.

What Is The Difference Between Route53 And Cname?

A DNS record type is known as Cname(Canonical Name) that is used for aliasing one domain to another whereas Route53 is a DNS service used for managing and registering domains.

What Is Route53 In GCP?

In GCP, the service named Cloud DNS used for the equivalent functionalities as Route53 in AWS. Both facilitates the scalable and reliable DNS solutions within their respective cloud environments.

Why It Is Called Route53?

The Name Route53 refers to its port number. The DNS protocol’s port 53 is used in this service that is used as referencing name displaying an essential characteristics of the service of traffic routing and domain name management.

Which Three Main Functions Does Amazon Route53 Performs?

Amazon Route53 is a flexible and scalable tool for developers and business performing. Its provides traffic routing and load balancing, DNS resolution with low latency, domain registration and maintenance as three primary tasks.

Does VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer Offer Route 53 Monitoring Capabilities?

No, VMware NSX Advanced Load balancer does not offer this Route53 Monitoring capabilities.

What Does Amazon Route 53 provides?

Amazon Route facilitates with providing the features such as scalablility, reliable DNS web service and Domain Registrations.

Which actions can we perform in Amazon route 53 ?

The actions that can be performed in Amazon Route 53 include DNS Management, Traffic Routing, Health Checking and domain Registration.

Does Avi Offer Route53 Monitoring Capabilities?

Yes, AVi ( VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer ) offers Route53 monitoring capabilities.